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The first half of the Tar Heels' game at Louisville Saturday
had taken on the hideous flavor of other infamous Carolina road trips of the
last 15 years-Florida State in 2000 (down 36-7 at intermission), Virginia in
2004 (throttled 35-10), Clemson in 2006 (whitewashed 35-0), and right back here
in Louisville in 2005 (battered 38-7). The question at such junctures for the
winning team is this: Can you retain your intensity and keep the pressure on
for 30 more minutes? And for the losers it's gut-check time, a chance to
inventory your pride, heart, resolve and ability to quickly determine what's
fixable within the 20 minutes until the second-half kick-off.

"We played about as bad as we can play," Tar Heel head coach
Larry Fedora said, walking off the field with his team trailing 36-7.

Louisville scored on all six possessions. It was headed to a
720-yard total offensive game if you extrapolate the stats. Senior linebacker
Kevin Reddick missed a free shot on Cardinal QB Teddy Bridgewater in the first
quarter, Bridgewater then stepping up and connecting on a 32-yard scoring pass.
The Tar Heels had two turnovers on offense and lost 24 yards on a center snap
flying over QB Bryn Renner's head. They had minus-16 yards rushing in the first
quarter.

"I was not calm, I'll say that," Fedora said of his demeanor
in the halftime locker room. "I was disappointed in the effort and enthusiasm
with our team in the first half. That's not who we are, we can't play that way.
Nobody can play that way. You have to play with energy and enthusiasm and
passion. That's what the game is all about."

"It's been a long time since I've been in a game like that where
I've felt ashamed, humiliated, embarrassed at the way we were playing
defensively," added co-defensive coordinator Vic Koenning. "We couldn't stop
the run, couldn't stop the pass, we weren't even a good scout team."

Certainly one problem for the Tar Heels was adjusting to the
Cardinals' speed. Louisville coach Charlie Strong has built his program around
recruiting Florida fleetness afoot (nearly one-third of his roster hails from
the speed-rich Sunshine State). Tar Heel offensive coordinator Blake Anderson
said last week that defensive end Marcus Smith was a "freak of nature" with his
size and swiftness and said all of the Cardinals' ends run "like a sprint-relay
team." Koenning said watching tape of the Cardinals reminded him of the
late-1980s/early 1990s Miami Hurricanes. Nowhere on the Tar Heel defensive
roster can you find the swiftness on the edge that Louisville possesses, thus
preseason scrimmages of "good vs. good" in the Tar Heel camp were of no help to
the offense in developing a feel for a similar challenge to come.

Another issue was a nasty spiral of downward momentum. One
mistake breeds another. An offensive miscue puts the pressure on the defense. A
porous defense puts the gun to the offense's head, demanding a perfect seven
points every possession. The Tar Heel sideline in the first half was a
compendium of somber faces, hung heads, coaches appealing with various degrees
of psychology and grease-board frenzy.

"The game of football, you've got to put out a lot of
energy, play with energy and enthusiasm," Fedora said. "When you keep giving up play after play
after play, eventually you just don't have it any more. I think that's what
happened early in the game with the defense."

"It's hard to put a finger on it,"
Koenning adds. "It's one guy this play, one guy the next play. Our team right
now has some confidence issues. Superman knows he's Superman.
We're not Superman on defense. Part of coaching, though, is getting guys to
play like Superman. That's our job, getting our guys to believe they can make
plays. It's all part of the process."

One change the defensive staff
went to in the third quarter was to essentially limit its game plan to two
personnel groups and two calls within each. What it continued to do, though,
was to send Reddick after Bridgewater frequently (he blitzed on 40 of
Louisville's 71 snaps), and to use Tommy Heffernan as the first-team weakside linebacker.
Koenning said last week he had "made a move to shake up my room," which led to
Heffernan earning his first start of the season.

Heffernan's father, Dave, is a Miami attorney and a former
offensive tackle for the Hurricanes in the early 1980s, just before Butch Davis
arrived there as an assistant coach. Heffernan and Davis became friends later
as Heffernan was working as a radio commentator during Davis's successful run
as UM head coach in the late 1990s. That connection opened the door for Tommy
to walk-on to the Tar Heels' roster in fall of 2010. He has since earned a full
scholarship.

On Saturday Heffernan had 12 tackles as registered by the
scorekeeper in the press box, but Koenning said the count via his study of the
game tape had Heffernan in on 21 stops.

"Tommy did a nice job, he played a whale of a game,"
Koenning said. "He played really fast. He wasn't perfect. He's not going to be
a physical tackler, because he's 220 pounds. But he's playing really hard."

Louisville took the kick-off for the second half, forged its
way to the Carolina 20 yard-line, where it gambled on fourth-and-1. Heffernan
read the handoff to tailback Senorise Perry, stepped up in the "B Gap" and made
a swift, decisive tackle for a loss of one yard, his long brown hair flapping
in breeze like he was Clay Matthews or somebody.

Finally, something
good happened for the Tar Heels.

The offense built on those good vibes with a methodical
11-play drive augmented on Anderson's plan to take advantage of Louisville's
speed by letting its speedsters come at Renner, then dink screen passes over
their heads. The Tar Heels have some speed of their own, and slot receiver Sean
Tapley put his to excellent use by turning a pair of consecutive short throws
into gains of 25 and 21 yards. They set up a two-yard toss to Eric Ebron for
the score.

Fortified by its fourth-down success a few minutes earlier,
the defense took the hint of a good vibe back onto the field. And for the
second series in a row, it stopped the Cardinals, Reddick sacking Bridgewater
on third down with a nifty one-hand tackle. When the offense responded with
another touchdown, the score was now 39-21. Football was becoming fun again for
Carolina. Louisville, meanwhile, had lost its focus, with several thousand fans
having departed and those that remained having their lost their thirst for Tar
Heel blood.

"Rhythm, we finally got in a rhythm," receivers coach Gunter
Brewer said. "Offense is all about rhythm, one play feeding off the last. You
could feel it building, one side of the ball helping the other and coming
together as a team."

One sensed as the second half of Fedora's third game evolved
that it was time for a new storyline to emerge-one that centered on his fervent
passion for special teams play. Fedora and his coaches have played a vanilla
hand in the kicking game so far, primarily because they're still teaching the
basics early in their tenures and also because depth and injury problems have
forced them to constantly realign their special teams depth charts. It was
heartening to see, though, how well the point-after defense team adjusted to
Louisville's spread formation on its first extra point attempt and then stymied
the Cardinals' pass attempt for two points.

The coaches spotted some softness up the middle of
Louisville's punt team and figured that Romar Morris, one of the team's special
teams warriors through August camp and its first two games, could break through
for a block. Problem was, Louisville didn't punt until the middle of the fourth
quarter. Sure enough, Morris slithered and slammed through the middle of the
Louisville shield and blocked the punt, and soon after Norkeithus Otis hammered
the ball loose from a Cardinal kick-off return. The first recovery set up Tar
Heel touchdown that pulled Carolina within five at 39-34; the second one gave
Carolina a chance to win the game with just over four minutes left.

"We had two big plays, game-changing plays, in the special
teams," Fedora said. "A goal was to have one game-changing play. Because of
what happened in the first half, we needed more than that. Those two plays gave
us an opportunity to win the game."

Anderson called a quarterback draw for Renner on
third-and-goal at the Cardinal three, and with double-coverage on Ebron and
single coverage on three more receivers, the odds of spreading the defense out
enough to slip him into the end zone were good. But Ebron came out of his
stance, prompting a false start penalty. On fourth-and-eight, Louisville's
Andrew Johnson knocked the ball out of Erik Highsmith's grasp in the end zone
and pulled Highsmith's helmet off by the facemask in the process.

Highsmith first appealed for a penalty flag, then stood
motionless in the end zone for a moment, his fists clenched, his head bowed
back, his helmet five yards away on the ground, the ball four yards away and
the Cardinals celebrating en masse all around
him. On the sideline, Fedora grimaced and clasped his hands around the back of
his head. The steam was still coming out of everyone's ears well into the night
as they digested the misery of a first-half gone awry and a near-miracle
comeback.

Lee Pace (leepace7@gmail.com) has written Extra Points since 1990 and
has reported from the sidelines for the Tar Heel Sports Network since 2004.